Is it just me or does it seem as though 70% of this country's businesses were waiting for an awful incident like the one in Charleston, South Carolina three weeks ago in order to provide them an excuse to stop selling anything associated with the Confederate flag? Ever since Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston three weeks ago, it's felt as though at least one major business has publicly announced they'll stop selling anything affiliated with the Confederate flag. Amazon even went as far as to temporarily stop selling games pertaining to the Civil War, before they decided to backtrack and start selling them again. While I can understand many of these companies' decisions regarding the matter, I hope it doesn't reach the point where we pretend this chapter in our history never actually took place.
I, for one, think that the Confederate flag should be removed from all government property, except from museums. If one wants to fly the rebel flag on their own private property, then that's another matter entirely. While I'd never wave the flag at my residence, I also don't think it should be illegal to do so. Judging recent poll numbers, it seems that a growing number of people feel similarly. So, the real question is, how far do we take this? While I applaud my fellow progressives' call for having this flag removed at the South Carolina state Capitol, the symbol removed from a portion of Mississippi's state flag, and the like, I also worry about taking the matter too far.
The Confederate flag has long been a controversial symbol, which most Southerners feel is symbolic of their heritage and most non-Southerners feel is symbolic of racism and slavery (approximately 3/4 of Democrats find the flag at least somewhat offensive and roughly 1/2 of Republicans feel similarly, and this includes Southerners, whom tend to be much less offended by it). While I'm definitely in the latter of the two groups, I also think the symbol is somewhat necessary (in museums, textbooks, and such) so we don't lose track of our country's history, lose track of how we got to this point as a nation, and suddenly forget why we were offended by the flag in the first place. Some have called for a ban or the revising of films like Gone With the Wind and Forrest Gump due to some of the subject matter and symbols depicted in them, but what would that accomplish? There is at least one chapter to everyone's lives we'd like to erase, but to deny one chapter is to deny the full truth and leave one more prone to repeating past mistakes. Similarly, if we attempt to historically erase this symbol of hate, we'll leave ourselves more prone to repeating past mistakes. Slavery is a chapter in our country's history we'd all like to pretend didn't exist, but it did, and we'll be all the better off trying to learn and grow from that awful chapter than attempting to ignore it altogether.
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